Most Distant Black Hole Discovery Challenges Current Understanding of Early Universe Formation

Newly discovered black hole, UHZ1, reveals growth patterns challenging the "small seed" scenario due to its comparable mass to the host galaxy, hinting at formation from directly collapsing matter independent of star formation.

Two space telescopes, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) and the agency's Chandra X-ray Observatory, observed a giant black hole, named UHZ1, that has a mass approximately equal to the galaxy that hosts it. This galaxy existed just 470 million years after the Big Bang.
UHZ1 is the most distant black hole yet observed in X-rays and its stage of growth gives scientists insight on how such objects formed.
Judging by the brightness and intensity of the X-rays, which are connected to the strength of the black hole's gravity, the black hole has a mass of the order of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of solar masses, equivalent to the mass of its host galaxy.
Models on how supermassive black holes form offer two main theories. One states they formed through rapid mergers of stellar-mass black holes produced by exploding stars. The other posits that they formed directly from a collapsing gas cloud that had a mass between 10,000 and 100,000 times that of the sun. This discovery suggests that the newfound black hole was born large, indicating the latter theory.
This discovery challenges the 'small seed' scenario where supermassive black holes grow from stellar-mass seeds. The direct collapse of gas to form large "seed" black holes, that are at least tens-of-thousands of solar masses and independent of any stars that form, may instead be the process.